


The Moon

by en passant (corinthian)



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 05:17:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5526836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corinthian/pseuds/en%20passant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the moon is upright, it represents an illusion — a hidden fear, insecurity or something in the subconsciousness. When it is reversed it represents the release of fear, unhappiness and confusion.</p>
<hr/>
<p>Toolshipping, mentions of past KingCrab & Treason/Inverse. After it all, there's still loose ends to tie up and a special surprise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Moon

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas, Agito! May your holidays be merry and bright!

"Do you think, if things were different, that we still would have met?" Yuusei asked, once. He asked Bruno that because Bruno didn't know — not the whole story. It wasn't that Yuusei was hiding it, but there was no good way to begin it. No way to explain how Satellite came to be, how Neo Domino stayed so shiny even as it cast a shadow down on Satellite, how even though things were "better", sometimes it felt like nothing was different.

But, it was a nice thought. (The most selfish thought he let himself have, that if everything was different, he wouldn't lose anyone. Not a single friend, not Aki or Bruno, no one.)

"Of course!" Bruno responded, immediately. He was all smiles and laughs and all too eager to take Yuusei's hand in his. "I don't think we could not meet."

They were just so perfect, like that.

"Yeah... probably, somehow." Yuusei agreed. Bruno squeezed his hand first, so he had to return the gesture. It was reassuring, the way their hands fit together and, probably, it would always be like this.

"After all of this," Yuusei started. After the tournament, after they found Bruno's missing past, after _all_ of that, he meant. "Do you think — "

Of course, Bruno had agreed.

Probably.

* * *

Jack calls, because he's the one who always does. It's abrupt and brutal and demanding — because that's the kind of person he is and always will be. Yuusei takes the call, puts down everything at work (mostly, just paperwork, all the heavy lifting with Fortune has already been completed) to take it.

"Yuusei. Oi." Jack nods.

"Jack," Yuusei smiles, a little.

"Carly wants you to visit." Which, really, meant that Jack did. He had been trying to get Yuusei to leave Domino since they all left Domino. They all do, alternating calls and letters and other messages. Every time, Yuusei turns them down.

The only person who didn't was Kiryuu, but he visited often enough, bringing Nico and West to see the big city.

"Jack, you know I can't." Yuusei stalls. He's been stalling for years.

"Like hell you can't," Jack accuses, "You just don't want to."

Yuusei doesn't quite know how to say that it feels like a betrayal so he just shrugs, helplessly. "There's a lot of work to be done."

"You say that every time." 

"It's true, every time." It isn't quite a lie. Yuusei knows there's always more work to be done. If not on Fortune than in Satellite. If not there, then in Domino. He can always find something to busy his hands, because there's always something to fix.

"You can't run away from everything forever." Jack deflates, a little, he always does when he's getting serious. It's Jack at his most dangerous and most perceptive. "Even if you made a choice, it doesn't mean you can't make another one."

"We can't all be you, Jack." Yuusei, however, knows exactly how to shake him out of it.

"What's that supposed to mean!? Yuusei!" Jack roars back to life and they're comfortably bantering, again.

It's fine, this way.

* * *

"Your name reminds me of the stars." Bruno said.

Yuusei didn't look up from the D-Wheel engine he was tinkering with. But he must have heard Bruno wrong. 

"Hm?"

"Yuusei." Bruno continued and pointed out of the open garage door. It had been afternoon when they started working, but somehow it was already so late in the night that Domino's cityglow had dimmed, a little. The stars could just barely be seen through the halo that the skyscrapers and other lights cast.

"Not really." Yuusei said.

Bruno laughed — sheepish. "Sorry, sorry, I don't mean —"

"No, it's just —"

They both tried to explain at once, and then stopped, simultaneously, and then had to laugh. For Yuusei, there was something so freeing about it. Just a complete misunderstanding. Yuusei stopped working on the engine and walked over, so they were closer. So maybe he could see what Bruno saw.

"I guess, more, it's you." Bruno continued, after their laughter died down. "It's you that reminds me of the stars."

Yuusei didn't know what to say to that. Bruno didn't talk like anyone he knew. The world was different with Bruno — and some of those things, Yuusei knew, weren't because of Bruno. But because the bridge between Satellite and Neo Domino had been completed and because there was positive change in the air. But also, because Bruno made things better. Doing the same old things with Bruno was a new experience each time and Yuusei wanted to be greedy and drink them all in.

"It's you." Yuusei said. "It's not me."

"Maybe it's us together! Oh — does that sound weird?" Bruno waved his hands as he spoke, and Yuusei gave in to his urge to catch them, both, with his own.

They laughed again.

"Us together." Yuusei agreed.

* * *

Kiryuu visits, every few months, usually with the kids but this time he comes alone. He brings a broken duel disk and a laptop that looks like it's been shot. He drops them both on Yuusei's work bench — because of course Yuusei is at work, and reception knows Kiryuu well enough to just send him on in, since if anyone waits for Yuusei to be done with work they'll probably die before he goes out to meet them.

"Dunno how they broke." Kiryuu says, shrugs. "Mind giving them a look?"

Every time Kiryuu visits alone he brings something that needs to be fixed. It's his way of excusing his presence, because he and Yuusei still haven't quite figured out what to do with each other.

"Looks like someone broke them." Yuusei says, dryly, but immediately swivels his chair around to start working on the duel disk first. "How are things?"

"Nico and West are good. The town is... good. Things seem to be good." Kiryuu says in a way that sounds a little haunted. He's always uneasy with progress, because it's always come at a cost and he doesn't believe that he'll ever get something good without paying for it. Not anymore, anyway.

"Hm," Yuusei responds.

"And with you? Fancy as ever." Kiryuu gestures to the lab. In the background people move, machines do their business, but everything is as it should be. The hardest work is done. Yuusei mostly keeps working because he knows that he's needed here.

"Not really."

"Yuusei," Kiryuu puts his hand on Yuusei's shoulder. "Come on."

And it's always been hard to lie to Kiryuu. Maybe it's the way he smiles when he wants information from people or just that Yuusei's never figured out how to defend himself from Kiryuu.

"I don't really know." Yuusei finally says, after a long pause. "I don't know what to do now."

"We'll figure it out, we always do." Kiryuu grins and ruffles his hair. "Don't worry, you've always been good at fixing things. I've always been good at breaking them. Together that's something, right?"

Yuusei snorts. "You're good at other things too."

"So, no problem, right?"

"Yeah, no problem."

* * *

Sometimes, Yuusei wants to ask someone — anyone — if he made the right decisions, during the duels with Z-One and with Bruno. But he thinks, mostly, that he wants someone to tell him that it will be okay, and it won't ever be.

* * *

"You're the first person I — er, I mean — " Bruno squeezed his eyes shut and blurted the rest out, "The first person I want to kiss! The — kind of the only one, I guess! I don't really remember anyone else so —!"

Yuusei gaped. He didn't say anything and just stared, blinked, swallowed. Bruno stayed still, eyes still shut, and waited.

It was awkward. The first kiss Yuusei had ever had was with Jack, they had been young and stupid and it hadn't even really been a _real_ kiss. His first _real_ kiss had been with Kiryuu. But every kiss had been natural, sometimes rushed, sometimes they just fell together. There hadn't been any questions, no shut eyes, no nervous hands.

"You're not my first." Yuusei said, and stood up on his tiptoes, grasping Bruno's nervous hands with his own and kissed him.

"Oh." Bruno said.

It was a quick kiss, because Bruno didn't know what to do with his lips, really, but even as he turned his face to the side, and slowly opened one eye to chance a look at Yuusei, they kept holding hands.

"Sorry, sorry — I mean —" Bruno stammered.

Yuusei wasn't sure what to say to that, so he kissed him again.

* * *

Just five years after Fortune is started, it's complete. Absolutely complete. So complete that Yuusei is relieved of his duties and told that even though they all appreciate his hard work. . . to get out of the office. A polite being let go, at least for a little while.

Yuusei doesn't know where to go from there. It's odd to think of his life as purposeless again. It had always been someone else's goals that pulled him along — Kiryuu's ambition, Jack's neediness, destiny. 

So he goes back to where it started, in Satellite where they're repaving the roads. Old Momentum is even more degraded, even more hidden away and soon it will be torn down, filled with new concrete and made into the same kind of place that Neo Domino is. Perhaps a shopping center, or apartments.

But for now it's a secret place where not even ghosts can be found. Or, rather, that's what he thinks, climbing through the rubble. But something catches his eye — blue and white and yellow, a jacket.

Impossibly out of place and all too familiar.

"Bruno!" He yells the name and scrambles across the broken bits of building before he knows what he's doing. He _must_ be wrong, because there's no way for Bruno to be _here_. Yuusei's heart drops to the ground, because he's wrong.

It is Bruno, sitting on the ground there, looking up at the sky with a slightly dazed look on his face. Then he drops his gaze down and meets Yuusei's eyes. He smiles.

"Hey, Yuusei."

Yuusei can't make any movement forward and he can't step back, either, even though he's seized with the sudden urge to run. All he can do is say "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." And sink to his knees.

"What's there to be sorry about?" Bruno asks, he stands up and he looks even taller than before. He looks so unfamiliar, like the first time Yuusei saw him. There's something clean and unblemished about his face, eerily symmetrical — except his smile is just a tiny bit lopsided.

"Bruno," Yuusei whispers.

"Thank you," Bruno kneels down beside him, touches Yuusei's shoulder to ask silent permission and then pulls him into a tight embrace. "It — it wasn't really fair of us, to put so much on you. You were our only hope, though. And look and what happened. You really did it. I knew I could believe in you."

"Is this real?" Yuusei has to ask because he's had this dream before. Only it's been at the lab, or his apartment, even on the road, driving as fast as he can.

"It's real."

"I don't understand," and he says it with a little bit of laughter. It doesn't make any sense, because Bruno should be dead, because Yuusei killed him and yet.

"Time travel works in weird ways." Bruno's answer doesn't make a lot of sense, but Yuusei doesn't really care, either. "A synchro summon to save the world that also puts humanity on a different path can do a little more than just that."

"Okay." He laughs. "Okay. Welcome back."

And it's just as good as saying, _I love you, I missed you, I didn't know what to do without you._

* * *

_"Do you think, if things were different, that we still would have met?" Yuusei asked._

_"Of course!" Bruno replied._


End file.
